TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.
Russell Vought has been called the shadow president, including by my guest, journalist Andy Kroll. Vought is the director of the Office of Management and Budget - not the sexiest-sounding title, but he's the architect behind the Trump administration's dismantling of federal agencies, slashing foreign aid, pausing or canceling over $400 billion for infrastructure and clean energy projects in blue states, ending the Justice Department's independence from the president, stuffing so many budget cuts in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, and expanding the power of the president. He was also one of the people behind Project 2025, which was intended to be a blueprint for a second Trump term, and that's what it's become. Vought describes himself as a radical constitutionalist. Andy Kroll has been investigating how Vought has been using his power and what his goals are. Kroll covers the Justice Department and judiciary system for ProPublica, where he's written extensively about Vought. Kroll has an article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica titled "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball." Kroll is also the journalist who first got access to and published the video of Vought saying this back in 2023.
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RUSSELL VOUGHT: We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. We want - when they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work.
(LAUGHTER)
VOUGHT: Because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can't do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so. We want to put them in trauma.
GROSS: OK, and there's one more Russell Vought clip I want to play for you that will give you more of a sense of Vought's goals and strategy. When he was on The Tucker Carlson Show in November 18, 2024, just 13 days after Trump was reelected, Carlson asked Vought about his priorities. This was on top of Vought's list.
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VOUGHT: So my belief, for anyone who wants to listen, is that you have to - the president has to move executively as fast and as aggressively as possible with a radical constitutional perspective to be able to dismantle that bureaucracy and their power centers. And I think there are a couple of ways to do it. Number one is going after the whole notion of independence. There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such - SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup. But that is not something that the Constitution understands. So there may be different strategies with each one of them about how you dismantle them, but as an administration, the whole notion of an independent agency should be thrown out, particularly with the Department of Justice in which there's literally no law. All it is is precedent from the Watergate era, that the attorney general and those lawyers don't work for the president. And...
TUCKER CARLSON: Well, who do they work for?
VOUGHT: They think that they work for themselves. They think that they are...
CARLSON: So they have the power to kill people just 'cause they awarded themselves that power?
VOUGHT: They...
CARLSON: The power to kill people. I mean...
VOUGHT: They believe that they have the power for all of the prosecutions and that the president doesn't get a say in any of that. And that - we have to go at that as hard as we possibly can.
GROSS: Well, Andy Kroll, welcome to FRESH AIR. We have a lot to talk about (laughter).
ANDY KROLL: Yeah, we sure do. It's a real pleasure to be here.
GROSS: Pleasure to have you. So let's get into what we just heard Russell Vought say. I'll start with federal agencies. Why are they such a big target for Vought?
KROLL: Russ Vought believes that federal agencies are one of the chief reasons that, in his view, the American government has ceased to serve the American people and that it has become this rogue bureaucracy where there are civil servants who are unelected and who have their own agendas. They, in his belief, ignore the president and carry out this plan, these policies, these rules and regulations that, again, in Russ Vought's view, have become completely untethered from the will of the president and then the people who elected that president. And he wants to rip out as much of that bureaucracy as he possibly can. He calls it the deep state. He deeply believes that, as he put it in a different part of that Tucker Carlson interview, that the bureaucracy in the American government hates - to use his term - the American people and has to be eliminated.
GROSS: OK. So he says that the agencies aren't mentioned in the Constitution and therefore, they don't necessarily even have a right to exist, if I'm hearing him correctly. What is mentioned in the Constitution is the separation of powers between the president, the judiciary and Congress. He thinks, according to the clip we just heard, that the president should be involved directly with the judiciary. Does that violate the Constitution?
KROLL: It certainly would be a major break from how our three-part system of government has operated for quite a long time, and it would certainly be a break in terms of what the president is now doing as it relates to Congress from the plain text of the Constitution itself. What I'm talking about here is the Article 1 authority that Congress has, No. 1 job that Congress has, the power of the purse. Pass the laws with funding to implement those laws. Article 2, as anyone who has done a cursory read of the Constitution knows, says that the president must take care to implement those laws faithfully. Russ Vought has a very different theory of this case. As he and President Trump and this administration have shown in the almost 10 months they've been in office, they believe that the president has vastly more power to defy Congress' will, to block spending, to block programs approved by Congress, to essentially step on that Article 1 authority and really scramble the fundamental idea of separation of powers that, again, has governed this country for quite a long time.
GROSS: Why is Congress allowing the president to limit the power of Congress? Why are Republican congressman standing for that?
KROLL: It's a very good question. I think it speaks to the degree to which the Republican Party today is so controlled by one man, the president of the United States right now, Donald Trump. If you talk to members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, you come away with the impression that the overriding concern that most Republican members of the House and the Senate have in their day-to-day existence is winding up on the wrong side of President Trump, winding up on the wrong side of his most ardent followers. So when these confrontations have come up this year, when Russ Vought has acted in ways that have thwarted, again, Congress' fundamental power of the purse responsibilities, Congress has essentially said, oh, OK. You know, well, maybe we'll put out some strongly worded statements saying we disagree, maybe we'll grumble a little bit to the Capitol Hill Press Corp. But the Republicans who run Congress right now, to be clear, seem much more concerned about staying in the good graces of President Trump and his base than they do about asserting Congress' institutional authority, which, again, is really uncharted territory for how our government is supposed to function.
GROSS: Russell Vought also wants the president to be able to fire federal workers who don't adhere to the president's agenda. And part of his rationale is that federal workers weren't elected, so the president should be able to fire them, like any boss can fire an employee. Vought wasn't elected either. So where does his power come from? Is he that powerful as the director of the Office of Management and Budget?
KROLL: The power comes from a few places. Some of it is the nature of the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, and I can get into that a little bit more. Some of it, though, is really an extension of this maximalist view of executive power. It's been referred to as the unitary executive theory - this notion that Article 2 of the Constitution gives the executive, gives the commander in chief vast powers, not just to dictate foreign policy or to shape the agenda of the various agencies that are in the executive branch, but to actually go in and fire people who are ostensibly protected by the kind of civil service safeguards, workplace protections, in some cases, actual collective bargaining agreements in place. That the president has this blanket authority to just say, no, those bargaining agreements are not valid. Those unions are not legitimate. I can go in and just say, you are fired at the Department of Education. You several thousand employees at the Department of Homeland Security, your positions are eliminated. So there's that kind of - almost a legalistic blanket approach that is just essentially pointing to Article 2 and saying, Article 2 stands for a lot more than people think it does.
But then there is this little-known, not particularly sexy, as you put it, but incredibly powerful agency known as the Office of Management and Budget. And it sits at this critical juncture in the American government. Congress, as we talked about, passes the laws, appropriates the funds, sets the policy agenda. And I think a lot of Americans figure that, OK, Congress does that. The money goes to these agencies. The plans, the laws go to the agencies, and that's how our government works. But there is this office, OMB, that sits in between Congress and the agencies that in the hands of Russ Vought has become this choke point to cut off funding, to cut off the functioning of programs and to exert the president's will in a way that we honestly haven't seen since the Nixon administration.
GROSS: OK. I want to talk with you a lot more about what Vought is doing to American government. But first, we have to take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is Andy Kroll, an investigative reporter for ProPublica covering the Justice Department and the judiciary. He has an article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica about Russell Vought titled "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Andy Kroll, an investigative journalist covering the Justice Department and the judiciary at ProPublica. He's been investigating Russell Vought, the person behind Trump's dismantling of federal agencies and expanding the power of the presidency. Vought is the director of the Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025. He's the subject of Kroll's article in The New Yorker, written in collaboration with ProPublica, titled "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball."
Does Vought, as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, get to veto, like, budgets that come across his desk? Does he have any kind of final say over how money is dispensed?
KROLL: Not in a permanent, official kind of way. The director of the Office of Management and Budget can't put a veto on, say, a multibillion-dollar program to support clean energy or to build the Second Avenue subway in New York City. That is the role of Congress - again, writes the laws, appropriates the money. What OMB does in normal times is what I've kind of likened to a loving but cautious parent, who gives out an allowance to their kids at sort of regular intervals to try to make sure that those kids don't spend the money that's going to them in one fell swoop. So OMB apportions money - to use the wonky term - to federal agencies at a kind of regular cadence to basically make sure that, say, the EPA doesn't run out of money two months before the fiscal year is over. Agencies have some problems with controlling the spending if they don't have that sort of regulator in place, that cadence coming from OMB. So that's what OMB normally does.
What it has done in a massive way, in an unprecedented way with Russ Vought in charge, is actually say, we're just not going to apportion that money, period. We've frozen money that is supposed to go from Congress to, say, the National Institutes of Health or the Environmental Protection Agency or the IRS. We're freezing it. And they give various reasons. They say, we're doing a review of this funding, but these reviews have no timetable. The agencies don't know how long or why this review is happening. Or Vought and his colleagues will say, this funding doesn't align with the president's priorities. It's part of the green new scam, a term that they've used, or it's part of, quote-unquote, "transing our kids." And so they just hold the money back. And that has created this chaos across the federal government because the normal functioning of how laws get passed, money gets appropriated, and agencies do their work has been completely jammed up.
GROSS: And after the money is frozen, does it expire at the end of Congress' term?
KROLL: It depends on what kind of money we're talking about. Sometimes the money is over a multiyear period. Sometimes the money is called no-year funding, which means it doesn't have an expiration date. But by and large, this money does have an expiration date, often one fiscal year. And the money will expire at the end of the fiscal year if it hasn't been spent. And one budgetary gambit that Vought has used just, you know, several months ago was trying to freeze federal funding so close to the end of the fiscal year that it would just expire on its own without any support from Congress, without any attempt to get the legislative branch to sign off on that. And again, this is one of these maneuvers that Vought is using now to try to upend the normal functioning of our democratic system.
GROSS: So in full disclosure, I should mention that Congress had voted funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes federal funding to public radio and public TV. But then Vought had asked Congress to rescind that money, to claw it back, and they did. So is that kind of thing unprecedented? And also, there's something that's being called, not a pocket veto, but pocket rescission. Can you explain that?
KROLL: Yeah. And we're getting into the budgetary weeds here. But these are really critical.
GROSS: These are powerful tools.
KROLL: Yeah, that's right. And they are very much the tools that Vought has been using to accomplish the very goal he talked about in that Tucker Carlson clip that you played earlier. In June, the White House sent what's called a rescission request down Pennsylvania Avenue to Congress. What that asked Congress to do, that request, was to rescind $9 billion that Congress had already appropriated by law. It had passed a law that accounted for this money to go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to go to foreign aid programs. And now the White House said to Congress, we want you to take a vote on rescinding that money, zeroing it out.
The thing that is striking to me is that Vought tried to do this in the first Trump administration when he had a similar role at the Office of Management and Budget. And ultimately, he was the director at the end of the first Trump administration. They sent a massive rescissions request in the first Trump administration to Congress, and Congress said no. Congress narrowly defeated this measure. And it was seen back then as the legislative branch exerting its will, kind of standing up for itself and saying, we write the laws, we appropriate the money. We don't support you, the White House, coming over here and telling us to undo work that we've already done, the negotiations, the compromises, the deal-making.
Fast-forward to this summer, Vought goes back to the tool kit and sends another rescission request to Congress for Corporation for Public Broadcasting funding, for USAID foreign aid funding. And this time it passes. Congress votes to rescind this money. And the effects of that, of course, have been pretty devastating for the programs and agencies affected. But then a few months later, Vought takes an even more aggressive step in the same direction. He issues what he has called a pocket rescission.
What that essentially means is it's a request that went to Congress and said, we want to rescind even more money. This time, it was about $5 billion, again, targeting foreign aid. But what Vought essentially told Congress was, I don't need your vote. I don't need you at all to rescind this money because the way the law works, Congress has a 45-day period to consider one of these rescission requests, to consider, again, whether to undo work it had already done.
Vought sent this request down Pennsylvania Avenue so close to the end of the fiscal year for Congress that he said, I don't need your support - the clock is going to run out, and the money will go away. That is a maneuver that's largely seen as not legal. Republicans in Congress said as much to Vought. But by all indications, he was undaunted by this. And he sees this pocket recission - kind like a pocket veto, but again, specifically targeting funding at programs - as a way that he can erase government funding whether Congress likes it or not.
GROSS: My guest is Andy Kroll, an investigative reporter for ProPublica covering the Justice Department and the judiciary. He has an article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica about Russell Vought titled "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball." We'll be right back. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF TERENCE BLANCHARD'S "AIN'T YO STUFF SAFE HERE")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Andy Kroll, an investigative journalist covering the Justice Department and judiciary at ProPublica. He's been investigating Russell Vought, the person behind Trump's dismantling of federal agencies and expanding the power of the presidency. Vought is the director of the Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025. He's the subject of Kroll's article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica titled "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball."
It seems that one of the things that Russell Vought is doing is creating chaos - freezing funds with agencies not knowing, like, if those are going to be unfrozen or if they'll never get that funding back, creating chaos, in many ways, in agencies, creating some chaos in Congress. Because Trump has been telling Republicans in Congress what to do, and sometimes that's contradicting what they've already voted to do. Is chaos a goal of Russell Vought's?
KROLL: I don't think you can take in the full sweep of what this administration has done in less than a year and not come away with thinking that chaos is a goal and certainly an outcome that serves Vought and his team's larger agenda of putting cracks in the federal government, shaking the stability of this typically rock-solid, steady institution that is the federal bureaucracy. I talked to dozens of people who have worked with Vought, who have observed him closely - talked with a lot of federal workers who have been affected by the funding freezes, affected by the mass layoffs, affected by all the different maneuvers that Vought has attempted so far. One thing that really stuck with me - and it came out of one of these conversations with a former civil servant - was how much this administration and really Vought's efforts have shattered this idea of public service, at least at the federal level, as a reliable, stable way to not just find employment, but to serve a greater good, to serve your country, to be a part of this larger mission, this larger ideal.
You know, the people who work in the federal government aren't doing it because the pay is great. They're not toiling away at the Education Department or the FBI because it's going to make them famous or they're going to achieve viral influence or status. They do it because they believe in this larger mission, and they're willing to work under Democratic and Republican presidents. But there is this larger notion of public service, this ideal that drives them. That idea has really taken a beating in this administration to the point that former federal workers I talked to have said, things are so chaotic. Things are so uncertain. I don't know if I would want to work for the federal government again because I don't want to have to go through what I've already gone through this year.
GROSS: I wonder if that's intentional. Like, if you want to destroy federal agencies and the so-called deep state, one way to do it is to discourage people from working in federal government, to make it seem like you're not going to have a reliable job. We might take it away from you at any point. If the president thinks you're disloyal and you're not following his agenda, he has the right to fire you. We can defund agencies. We can close the doors of agencies. So, like, you're asking for instability. You might be an idealist, but, you know, this might not be good for you.
KROLL: I have to think that that is the intended outcome. And I think this comes back to the line of Vought's that set me down this path, this yearlong path of reporting, which were these comments about wanting to put civil servants in trauma. I went back and looked at his social media footprint. He doesn't have a major presence online. He is not a Pete Hegseth or a Kash Patel, who sees himself as this kind of public influencer-type figure. But Vought does chime in every once in a while, and he has over the years. And what I found, actually, was there was a New York Times article that came out when Joe Biden was president. But it talked about the lingering effects of the first Trump administration's chaos and the dysfunction and the aggressive policy changes at the top, specifically at the EPA. And there was someone in there - in The New York Times article - who said that this was a traumatic experience for the people who worked at the EPA. The first Trump administration there - we're talking about here. And Russ Vought shared this story online, and he shared it with a little message above that said, quote, "straight into my veins," as in, I love what this story is conveying about federal workers feeling traumatized. And clearly, his goal was to try to replicate that on a much larger scale. And that is just something that has really stuck with me this entire time, is this psychological motivation that he has to want to traumatize people who have devoted their lives, their careers to public service.
GROSS: Well, we need to take another break, so I'm going to reintroduce you. My guest is Andy Kroll, an investigative reporter for ProPublica covering the Justice Department and the judiciary. He has an article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica about Russell Vought titled "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF JULIAN LAGE GROUP'S "IOWA TAKEN")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Andy Kroll, an investigative journalist covering the Justice Department and judiciary at ProPublica. He's been investigating Russell Vought, the person behind Trump's dismantling of federal agencies and expanding the power of the presidency. Vought is the director of the Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025. He's the subject of Kroll's article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica titled "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball."
As part of your investigation into Russell Vought, you got access to court records. And you did interviews with people close to Vought. And you learned that DOGE was guided more than was previously known by Russell Vought. What did you learn about his role that we didn't know before?
KROLL: I think the way to understand Vought and DOGE is this. Vought is a planner. He's a thinker. He's a student of not just history, but how the federal government works and where the levers are that he can pull to try to enact his agenda. DOGE with Musk at the head was like a battering ram, a blunt force instrument that swept through the federal government trying to get rid of as many employees, cancel as many programs as it could, as fast as it could.
And so I think, while there may have been some particular programs, there may have been some specific offices that Russ Vought may not have wanted to get rid of or may not have had on his list of targets to be wound down and DOGE did go after those, DOGE kind of changed the calculus for Vought. But for a lot of Trump administration officials, they saw that if you moved fast and broke things, to use the Silicon Valley catchphrase, you could kind of get away with it.
GROSS: Was Russell Vought the person behind DOGE? Was it his idea to start that?
KROLL: From all the reporting I've done, people I've talked to who are close to DOGE, that was very much an Elon Musk idea, something that Musk pitched to the president and the president embraced. In some ways, I think DOGE kind of got in the way initially of Vought's plans that he had been crafting for years for a potential second Trump administration. But as things started to play out earlier this year, and as DOGE started to move so aggressively through the federal government, I think Vought saw an opportunity to take advantage of what DOGE showed was possible and to take even more drastic action. He did not choose to be in this situation, Russ Vought. But he saw a way that he could use it to his advantage, based on all of the interviews, all of the documents I've read, and he took that opening.
GROSS: Yeah, they're opposite in terms of approaches. You know, Musk had the chainsaw, and Russell Vought is more of a technocrat. Like, he knows all the ins and outs of congressional rules. He drafts executive orders. He works to break the rules by knowing the rules. But, you know, one of the outcomes of DOGE is a lot of lawsuits. Can you talk more about that goal of creating lawsuits to see how far you can push things and still, you know, maybe violate law or push law and still be able to get away with it?
KROLL: We're seeing this play out right now as we approach a month of a federal government shutdown here in Washington. Vought and OMB sent out this memo a few days before the shutdown telling agencies to put together plans to lay off workers en masse during the shutdown. Now, that is something that all the legal experts I talked to, the congressional staffers, people steeped in the law of how personnel actions work in the federal government, say you can't do. You can't use a shutdown as an opportunity to lay off tens of thousands of people. That is exactly what Vought told agencies to do. That's exactly what he has given interviews saying he wants to do.
This is one of those examples of what you're talking about. It has teed up a legal fight that's playing out. A federal judge on the West Coast has, for now, temporarily halted Vought's actions, these agency actions, to lay off workers. But this seems like one of those moments where Vought is testing the limit. He's looking for ways to potentially get new precedent, change the law. And I think you see a number of those attempts across the board, freezing programs, laying off workers. That is very much a part of this strategy, looking for ways to get these questions in front of judges and try to change laws, find certain laws unconstitutional or just shift the line a little bit of what the executive power that a president has looks like.
GROSS: And in terms of the shutdown that we're experiencing now, one of Vought's plans when he was drafting his plans for a second Trump term was to use shutdowns as a way to accomplish his political goals. So you gave us one example. Are there other political goals he wants to accomplish through shutdowns?
KROLL: Vought sees shutdowns as these rare opportunities, though they're increasingly less rare lately, to achieve big policy outcomes that you can't get through the normal course of Congress or the normal course of the federal government's business. I quote him in the story in one of I think about 50 briefings that he gave that I got a recording of saying Republicans need to love shutdowns because shutdowns are the way you save the country. It's not just about using a shutdown as leverage to threaten or actually fire tens of thousands of federal workers. It's also the way that you try to achieve these really dramatic policy changes.
Right now, this shutdown is all about these really critical subsidies for Obamacare. The next shutdown could be trying to get Democrats to concede to major policy changes, funding cuts on clean energy or infrastructure, unwinding, say, Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act. Vought sees these shutdowns as chances to get what you can't otherwise achieve, you can't otherwise get the opposing party to agree to, when Congress is normally in session. That's why he's so eager for them.
GROSS: Russell Vought talks about the Constitution and democracy. But he supported Trump's false claim that Trump won the 2020 election. What does that say about Vought, do you think?
KROLL: I think it says that his loyalty to President Trump is so central to how he believes he is going to enact this larger vision for radically changing the federal government here in the United States. If he had broken with the president over the 2020 election, like a lot of other senior officials in the administration did, he loses the ability to be a part of the MAGA movement, to harness the political support, the energy of Donald Trump, America First, toward really things that Vought has been trying to do since long before Donald Trump has been on the political scene. I'm talking 20, 30 years back in time. So he stays loyal to the president, and he spends those four years between the two Trump presidencies remaining close to the president, saying that the 2020 election was stolen. And that gives him the ability to come back in office this time and have far more influence and leeway to do what he wants to do than he did even the first time around.
GROSS: You learned through previously unreported recordings of briefings by the think tank that he started during the Biden presidency, Citizens for Renewing America, that Vought had pressured members of the Freedom Caucus to ban critical race theory in schools. Where does that figure into his larger, like, political plan to expand the executive office?
KROLL: Vought has spent nearly 30 years working in Washington and has toiled away as a staffer on Capitol Hill, as an activist for the Heritage Action group and then, of course, in the Trump administration to try to find ways to convince the public to rally behind - and then members of Congress to actually shrink the size of the federal government in a dramatic way. These were always arguments being had about the debt, the deficit, the specific dollar amount of these programs.
What I learned in my reporting, largely drawing on these recordings that I obtained for this story, is that Vought comes to this realization that he has to link together the culture war and the fiscal wonky budgetary agenda if he's going to be successful. It's not enough to just talk about impoundment, to talk about how much this or that program costs. You need to come up with a way that makes that program feel wrong on a cultural level. He comes up with this phrase, woke and weaponized. Programs that have anything to do with diversity are too woke. The Justice Department and the FBI are weaponized. It becomes a very sticky talking point. And I think it's a real inflection point for him, where he brings together these two parts of his worldview and the larger MAGA agenda so that the public, or at least the president's followers, are along with him. They support, they understand why we're going after clean energy funding or why we're going after the community developmental financial institution - these wonky agencies that are now tagged as being too woke or they're being weaponized.
GROSS: We have to take another break here, so let me reintroduce you. My guest is Andy Kroll, an investigative reporter for ProPublica covering the Justice Department and the judiciary. He has an article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica about Russell Vought titled "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to the interview I recorded yesterday with Andy Kroll, an investigative journalist covering the Justice Department and the judiciary at ProPublica. He's been investigating Russell Vought, the person behind Trump's dismantling of federal agencies and expanding the power of the presidency. Vought is the director of the Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025. He's the subject of Kroll's article in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica titled "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball."
Russell Vought describes himself as a Christian nationalist. And he says, of course I describe myself that way. I'm a Christian, and I'm a nationalist. But when you say Christian nationalist, the implication is - or the definition is usually that you want to define America as a Christian nation. So to what extent does Russell Vought want to define America as a Christian nation? Like, what is - does he have a vision of what a Christian nation would be?
KROLL: He's talked about this in private settings - what that actually means that we are a Christian nation 'cause he very much believes that. He has said that repeatedly. He talks about it in a couple of ways. For instance, he has argued that if we are a Christian nation, then our immigration system should reflect that and there should be more vetting of people who want to come to this country legally, whether they believe Christianity or not. He has said, why would we let someone into this country who, for instance, believes in Sharia law? So that's one approach - you know, who do we even let into the country?
He's also talked at great length about Judeo-Christian values and teachings informing the work of people in public office, people who make policies, people who work not only in Congress but also in the executive branch and in the bureaucracy. How do you get policies that flow from Judeo-Christian worldviews? How do you make the legislative process more influenced by a Judeo-Christian worldview? For him, to go by his own words, that would mean that things like same-sex marriage are not compatible with that Judeo-Christian worldview and shouldn't exist. Abortion rights, in any form, not compatible with that Judeo-Christian worldview value system is how he's put it. He uses this term actual truth. I think it's a - kind of a biblical truth notion when he talks about how do we more integrate this specific Judeo-Christian value system with the functioning of our American government? It's a longer-term idea, obviously, but it's something that I think is really central to his own worldview.
GROSS: So Vought calls himself a radical constitutionalist. What does he mean by that?
KROLL: He means that the president has dramatically more powers than presidents have traditionally used, that the executive branch has far greater authority to exert the president's will and to freeze or block the work of Congress and that these independent agencies that have for so long operated without presidential or political interference should, in fact, be very much under the control at the direction of the White House. That, in his view, is what the founders intended. Hence, the name radical constitutionalists. That, of course, is not what many legal scholars and many administrations before this one have believed in how they have acted.
GROSS: What do you think are the permanent or at least the long-term changes that Vought will leave behind?
KROLL: The feeling that working for the federal government, that public service is not a safe and stable way to create a career, to be part of this larger American project, I think is a really major consequence and impact of what he's done. I think he has pushed the legal bounds of what the president can do to exert his will, talking about the funding freezes, talking about checking Congress' power of the purse, using the executive branch to choke off funding or redirect it in other - to other places that are more in line with the president's agenda. Ultimately, I think the biggest consequences of Vought's actions are going to play out in front of the United States Supreme Court. So many of the changes, the policies, the executive powers that Vought has exercised in just this year alone are likely going to end up in legal battles before the conservative supermajority in the Supreme Court. How the high court rules in those cases could lead to quite a radically different looking executive branch and even a dramatic set of changes to how we understand our three-part Democratic government working.
GROSS: Andy Kroll, thank you so much for your research, and thank you for being on our show. I appreciate it.
KROLL: It's a real pleasure. Thank you.
GROSS: Andy Kroll covers the Justice Department and the Judiciary for ProPublica. His article, "Donald Trump's Deep-State Wrecking Ball" is published in The New Yorker in collaboration with ProPublica. Our interview was recorded yesterday. If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like this week's interviews with film directors Judd Apatow, Cameron Crowe and Nia DaCosta, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producers' recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to, subscribe to our free newsletter at whyy.org/freshair.
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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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